Indian Startup Canvazify is A Pinterest for Team Ideas

Pune based a collaboration platform for team ideas, Canvazify was started in January 2014 byAbhijit Mhetre (CEO), Niket Puranik (CTO), Akshay Nahar (CMO) and Megha Mhetre. It is collaboration platform for teams to collect, brainstorm, and act on ideas from anywhere anytime. The startup helps teams stay focused and trace the evolution of ideas through its visual journey map.

“We firmly believe that world is rapidly moving from social era to collaboration era where people around the world come together to solve real problems. With exponential and deep penetration of internet and mobiles, people are connected all the time and platforms like Canvazify will play great role helping people innovate together to bring disruptive solutions to solve real problems much faster” said Abhijit Mhetre.

Many ideas are lost in notepads, whiteboards, stickynotes on wall or in digital places like messenger apps, emails, and documents. Significant time and efforts are wasted in keeping ideas in one place to derive meaningful insights. Canvazify is addressing this problem by providing digital canvas with predefined structures like Business Model Canvas, SWOT analysis, Six Thinking Hats, and many more to manage focused innovation. It helps teams to collect, brainstorm, and act on ideas anywhere anytime. The company captures all the action on the canvas and can present a visual journey map of how Canvas of ideas have evolved over a period.

Key features

Everything in one place helps you take better decision: Canvazify offers you a digital canvas to collect ideas as a digital sticky note. Each idea can be substantiated with media, discussions, and individual voting. This helps your team get more organised and take collaborative decisions faster.

Quickstart templates help team stay focused: Canvazify is loaded with Quickstart templates for focused user groups. For example, Startup entrepreneurs could use templates like Business Model Canvas, Idea Validation, and Product Canvas while a strategists find Six thinking hats and SWOT analysis templates useful.

Visual Journey Map helps build traceability: Most ideas take long duration to evolve. Canvazify “Replay” shows visual journey of canvas as it evolved with ideas. This helps existing team as well as new person to reflect on ideas and build complete traceability.

Traction numbers

The startup is noticing almost 30-40% MoM new user growth since past few months. Users from over 50 countries have discussed more than 26000 ideas on Canvazify and it has tracked close to 2 lakh actions till date. The company is also planning to launch its Android app early nest year as well as building API system for other tools integration to have seamless flow of ideas.

Commenting on the monetisation, Abhijit said, “Our primary monetization strategy is monthly/annual subscription plans. We also conduct workshops/consultancy to startups and enterprises on business model innovation, design thinking, and open innovation.”

Market size and market opportunity

Canvazify is a bootstrapped venture with a small revenue from paid customers. It is also planning to scale globally by raising external capital. It is competing with several players in enterprise communication and task management space providing different offerings. Established players like Murally, MindMeister, Trello, Evernote are its key competitors.

A research conducted by Forrester and Cisco, predicts that the collaboration services market would grow at 14% annually, reaching $67 billion by 2016. It also suggested that cloud-delivered services will represent 35% of the total collaboration services market by 2018.

Developed countries like North America and Europe region and emerging markets like India and China bring enormous opportunities for collaboration platform. At present, products like Basecamp, Trello, Evernote have seen a potential in Indian market. Products like this do have a scope to make their space.